Pukka Teacher

A bright speck of climate news was quickly overshadowed by the presidential election this week—America’s children have officially won the right to sue their government over global warming. Yesterday, a lawsuit filed by 21 youth plaintiffs was ruled valid by US District Judge Ann Aiken in Eugene, Oregon. A group of citizens, whose ages range from nine to 20, charged President Obama, the fossil fuel industry, and other federal agencies with violating their constitutional rights by declining to take action against climate change.

I keep seeing stuff about Lord of the Flies going around

I used to study Golding and I’m so happy to see a post about this!  Basically all the good Golding scholars agree that Lord of the Flies is intended as a condemnation specifically of western positivism and superiority, not a condemnation of human nature.  Golding believed that good societies were possible, but that he was not living in one.  (Relevant side facts for the curious: Golding was a sailor and teacher who based some of the boys’ behavior on the behaviors of his male students and fellow sailors.  He also drew on Ancient Greco-Roman mythology and literature, which is both rife with examples of horrific, inhumane behavior AND considered the foundation of western society.)  When white/western/imperialist/etc. people read Golding’s books and decide he means all societies are evil, it shows that they are incapable of not conceiving of themselves as the best society – “If he believes OUR society is evil, he must think ALL societies are evil, because of course we’re the BEST society, and the others must be worse than ours” even though the other societies are not seen in most of his books and may be doing just fine.

… aaahaa. Lord of the Flies was a Darker And Edgier AU spitefic.

A lot of people are surprised to learn that back in 1800, 90 percent of American teachers were actually male. Today we know that actually 76 percent of [them are] female, so how did this huge flip happen? The answer is that as school reformers began to realize in the 1820s that schooling should be compulsory — that parents should be forced to send their kids to school, and public education should be universal — they had to come up with a way to do this basically in an affordable manner, because raising taxes was just about as unpopular back then as it is now. So what we see is this alliance between politicians and education reformers in the early 19th century to redefine teaching as a female profession. They do this in a couple ways: First, they argue that women are more moral in a Christian sense than men. They depict men as alcoholic, intemperate, lash-wielding, horrible teachers who are abusive to children. They make this argument that women can do a better job because they’re more naturally suited to spend time with kids, on a biological level. Then they are also quite explicit about the fact that [they] can pay women about 50 percent as much — and this is going to be a great thing for the taxpayer.

NASA released a satellite image of india in the evening during the festive holiday of diwali, the celebration of lights.

I had a friend tell me "Modi was definitely involved in the riots, but the other candidates just don't have the development record he does. His religious views shouldn't influence if people vote for him."